Did you fall from heaven because...I have no idea what I'm talking about or whether
you like me at all.
Hey guys and gals, I’m Trace for DNews!
Let’s talk about sex, baby.
Specifically, let’s talk about how we talk about it without talking about it.
When someone is interested in someone else, usually they don’t walk right up and announce
it.
Instead people rely on the ancient art of flirtation.
A smile, a joke, a double entendre if you know what I mean.
We do this because flirtation tends to have a better success rate than outright declarations
of attraction, according to a University of New Mexico evolutionary psychologist.
But declarative statements, while robotic and off putting, at least have the advantage
of being unambiguous.
Flirting?
Not so much.
First of all, people can have a lot of different reasons for flirting.
According to research out of Northern Illinois University, there are six reasons people flirt:
casual fun, testing the waters, increasing intimacy, boosting self-esteem, trying to
gain something from the other person, and of course, expressing sexual interest.
So the miscues happen when men and women misinterpret signals.
Women either read too much into subtle clues or miss them entirely about evenly.
Men, on the other hand, see false positives way more often and tend to see what they want
to see.
In a forthcoming study in Personality and Individual Differences, researchers from Union
College and Harvard asked nearly 500 men to imagine a woman in a nightclub who notices
she’s being stared at and smiles back.
That wouldn’t be my reaction if 500 men were staring at me but anyway, the men were
then asked to gauge her level of interest.
First, the men were rated on whether they craved intimacy, or whether they distrusted
it.
Those who ranked higher in distrust tended to think women were less interested in them
and didn’t see the smile as flirtation.
But the men who craved intimacy tended to project it on the woman.
In other words, they imagined a completely hypothetical woman smiling at them and thought,
“Oh yeah, she totally digs me.”
Even when non-imaginary women are involved, men aren’t so great at reading their body
language.
One study from the University of Indiana asked 280 male and female undergraduates to look
at pictures of women and determine if they were being friendly, sexually interested,
sad, or rejecting.
The female participants hit the mark more often, while the males tended to read too
much into friendly body language.
It’s tempting to think this is because men are always looking for sex, but actually men
often misread cues in the opposite direction - they mistook sexual cues for simple friendliness.
Another small study conducted at the LWL University in Germany examined 22 men in fMRI machines
while they looked at pictures of men’s and women’s eyes and tried to guess what emotion
they were feeling.
These men took longer and were less accurate when guessing womens’ emotions, and their
amygdalae, which help interpret emotions and empathy, were less active than when they looked
in men’s eyes.
Of course, not all men are terrible at taking a hint.
Some are quite skilled at it, while some women struggle.
But overall, according to some social science, men are more likely to wrongly assume a woman
is interested in them, than the other way around.
So how do you tell what she’s thinking without blowing it?
Luckily for you, Tara has a video explaining the correct way to flirt.
Check it out here.
Let’s do a
little science too, guys and girls.
How often would you say you misread clues and picked up on something that wasn’t there?
Or how often were you completely oblivious to someone else’s advances?
Let us know in the comments, or on facebook or Twitter @DNews, it should make for fun
reading.
Subscribe for more and I’ll see you next time on DNews.